Storm Worms exploit April Fools

The miscreants behind the Storm Worm botnet have taken advantage of April Fools" day in a bid to infect more Windows PCs.

Security firms are warning users to avoid the temptation to click on
April Fools" day emails that may redirect them to maliciously
constructed websites.

The latest attempt to dupe more gullible users into getting their PCs infected kicked off on Monday with a spam campaign
designed to trick recipients into visiting websites under the control
of hackers containing executables with names such such as foolsday.exe,
Kickme.exe or funny.exe.

These spam emails feature Subject Lines such as "April Fool’s Day" and an equally unimaginative choice of images.

Trend Micro reports
that the miscreants behind the attack were too indolent to actually
create their own image to represent the holiday, so they simply Googled
"April Fools" and used the first image that showed up.

The creators of the Storm Worm have a history of using holidays and
special events as lures for their malware. The last major Storm run was
in the weeks leading up to Valentine"s Day.

As before, the latest spam campaign is designed to infect new
computers that will then become part of the larger Storm Worm botnet.
These compromised PCs can then be hired out to spammers, miscreants
interested in running denial of service attacks, adware distributors,
and other internet denizens. ®